Based on your feedback, we continue to add new capabilities on a regular basis to make Microsoft Teams an even more powerful hub for teamwork. Here’s a summary of the main updates that have rolled out or have started to roll out in the last few weeks.

Communicate more effectively with new chat functionality

Skype for Business contacts are coming to Teams – We’re importing your contact list from Skype for Business Online to Teams. Now, all your contacts and groups that you created in Skype for Business will show up in Teams under your contact list. To access your contacts, simply click on “Chat” in the left navigation and then on “Contacts”. Here, you can also add new contacts or create new contact groups.

In this first step, only contacts from your organization will be imported. Federated contacts from outside your organization will be added at a later point.

Access your Skype for Business contacts in Teams

Unified Presence between Teams and Skype for Business – Presence states for users (i.e. available, busy or in a call) will now be aggregated between Teams and Skype for Business. This ensures that a user has a single presence state regardless of the app and the device they use. For this functionality, the underlying Skype for Business account that is connected to the Teams user needs to be hosted in Skype for Business online.

Out of office message – On vacation or travel? Your out of office status and message will now show up in Microsoft Teams when people hover over your people card. Your coworkers will also get a reminder that you’re out of office when they @ mention you or send you a private chat.

Out of Office messages in Microsoft Teams

Skype for Business Interop with Persistent Chat – As companies upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams, we expect users in some companies to use both apps at the same time. To ensure continued productivity, we’ve added the ability for Teams users to communicate with other users who are using Skype for Business (both online or on-prem). Teams users can now also view the full interop chat history across their Microsoft Teams clients. For this functionality, the underlying Skype for Business account that is connected to the Teams user needs to be hosted in Skype for Business online.

Chat between a Teams and a Skype for Business user

Improved notifications about calls – If you have a missed call or a new voicemail, you'll start seeing a notification in your Activity feed. When you click on a missed call notification, you’ll be taken to the call history tab from where you can easily call the person back. When you click on a new voicemail notification, you’ll be taken to the Voicemail tab, where you'll be able to listen to your message or review a transcript. Please note that you will only see these notifications if you have a calling plan.

Collaborate more effectively

Collaborate securely with anyone in Microsoft Teams with guest access – We’ve rolled out the ability to add anyone as a guest in Microsoft Teams. This means that anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook.com, Gmail.com or others, can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings and files.

Previously, anyone with an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) account could be added as a guest, and now anyone with an email address can be added to a team. All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365, and can be managed securely within Azure AD.

Teams is getting smarter. We now support Indonesian, Romanian, and Vietnamese!

More channels per team - You're now able to create up to 200 channels per team (this includes channels you've deleted). Go forth and make channels!

Work with confidence: new features for IT admins

New Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center including Messaging Policies - To enable admins to better manage the various aspects of the service, we have started to roll out a new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center that provides you with a unified experience to manage both Teams and Skype for Business. The new admin center provides you with additional functionality including the ability to manage messaging policies on a user level. Read the full announcement for all details.

Retention policies – As an admin, you can now use the Office 365 security and compliance center to set retention policies for Teams – helping your organizations to stay complaint with regulatory obligations around preservation of documents and records. With retention policies for conversations, chats, and channel messages, you can decide proactively whether to retain content, delete content, or both, and then retain or delete the content based on a time duration. You can apply a single Teams policy to the entire organization or just specific users or specific teams. and decide proactively whether to retain content or delete content – for the entire organization, specific locations or user or specific teams. Read the full announcement for all details.

Install Microsoft Teams using MSI – Admins can now use MSI files (32-bit and 64-bit) to remotely deploy Microsoft Teams so that users do not have to manually download the Teams app. This enables organizations to leverage System Center Configuration Manager, Group Policy, or any 3rd party distribution mechanisms for broad deployments of Microsoft Teams. Learn more

New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps

The features Skype for Business Interop with persistent chat, unified presence between Teams and Skype for Business as well as contact groups have started to roll out on mobile clients as well.

Guest access on mobile – Guest access and account switching is now available on iOS and Android, and on unmanaged and managed devices. For managed Android devices, make sure you’re on the latest versions of the Authenticator and Company Portal apps.

You can now easily switch between different tenants you’re a member off.

Let us know what you think!

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.

How do I know which version the downloaded MSI installer is? When I open the MSI with it contains the Teams.exe where I can read the version number, though how do I verify installation status with SCCM. I ususally do this via version number to force updates, but there is no information in the documentation ab this.

Is it planned in the future that a link from a public MS Teams can be created and sent to employees who are current not member of this Team? If I test this curren,t the employee does not find the public Team only via the search function in Teams or the Webview.

Any news on call queues coming to Teams (and the unified admin panel)... Also an issue with using teams as a Skype for Business replacement was the fact that up until now if Internet connectivity is lost Teams does not automatically reconnect - you have to click a button to reset the connection, whereas SfB will just reconnect as soon as a connection is re-established. That made Teams unusable for inbound call termination unless the PC was hardwired into the network as a transient drop off in WiFi would disconnect the Teams user leaving them unaware of inbound calls. I have just briefly tested this on the new Teams client and it SEEMS on this brief test to have been fixed. Surprisingly this is not mentioned in the blog post. It will be interesting to see if the connectivity is now sufficiently robust to allow it to be used as the main client for inbound calls.

These are great updates and will help the migration to teams. One item though that still haunts me, and that is archiving old channels. We use Teams to document our monthly patching and old chat threads are beginning to stack up and clutter, but we don't want to delete since they have valuable information so deleting the channel is not an option. For now we just un-favorite it, but that is a per user setting.

we have installed Skype and Team client. When we install Team it does not replace Skype and it install as additional client instead of replacing skype.
More over we are not able to locate retention policies for Teams in our tenant ? whether we need to wait.

What controls the visibility of all of these new features? The contacts, the new control center, all of the most recent updates are not available to our tenant. Is there an opt-in available somewhere to be on a faster release like there is for Office?

With more collaboration with Skype, why isn't there a feature to export chats or save the conversations to mailboxes like Skype chats? There is no chat related commands in the PowerShell cmdlet for Teams.

Guess access enhancements definitely will help the external sharing capabilities for collaboration with external partners, vendors and users outside of the organization’s network. I can see this replacing the extranet sites needed in SharePoint on-prem and increasing communications with external users. Very Happy to see this update and the others to bring together more collaborative products into one tool. :thumbs_up:

When we do external teams meetings, they're announcing phone numbers by reading off the number -- this is new behavior to us. Is there a way to turn this off with Powershell or another way? It makes it difficult to host a large meeting with teams. Office 365 Support said this feature was not available.

I am unclear on how this is expected to behave. My company uses SfB on-prem but has not yet rolled out access to everyone. I just sent a message from Teams to someone who only has SfB on-prem. That person only got the usual email notification stating that I'm trying to get a hold of them through Teams.

On an unrelated note, why do I keep getting this error when I try to "@"mention someone in my post? "Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied."

Is there any steps or actions that need to be taken on this? Noticed our messaging centre seems to indicate the update is live, and led me here with a link. But checking this morning this newly mentioned functionality does not appear to be operational for me.

Anne Michels, Any news on the SfB call queues integration in Teams? This is the only requested feature holding us back from full deployment of the Office Phone System in combination with Microsoft Teams.

New version of teams is starting to give a javascript error for several people in our company. Will no longer launch for affected users. Took a video of the issue and shared with Office 365 support (link below). Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Still nothing about "buddy list" functionality? Is it really that hard?

We are a Microsoft infrastructure shop and I am all about having an integrated environment to make things easier on the user base as well as the IT folks. However, the lack of this functionality is a hard stop for us. There are a lot of things missing in our current tool, but it does have this - and so we are using it. I hate it, and I really want us to change to Teams. That move will never happen without this functionality.

@Anne MichelsOn 4/6 you informed another user to check back in a few days for these updates, but I still don't see them in my tenant and I'm opted into the Fist Release for our organization. When are all tenants expected to be updated so I can determine if I need to contact support?

One of my tenants finally has the new admin. My primary one does not. My gut tells me all the admin center / server infrastructure has to be finished deploying on all tenants before they light up the Presence features.